You aimed for B. You end up at Z.
When you use AI to write, plan, or create, you usually start with a goal. Call it point B. You want a draft, a summary, a list of ideas. But the way AI works—suggestions, autocomplete, full-blown generation—doesn't just speed you to B. It pulls you. The options it offers, the tone it adopts, the paths it makes easy, can quietly shift where you're going. By the time you're done, you might be at point Z: a different conclusion, a different emphasis, a different idea than the one you started with.
That's not always bad. Sometimes the drift is discovery. Sometimes it's bias, or blandness, or the model's preference instead of yours. The point is: using AI is not just "faster way to get to B." It's a process that can change the destination.
What to do with that
If you're building with AI, it's worth being explicit about drift. Do you want the tool to stay as close as possible to the user's stated intent? Or are you okay with—or even designing for—exploration and surprise? If you're using AI, it's worth asking: am I still heading where I wanted to go, or did I get nudged to point Z? And is that okay?
Intent and outcome have always been different; we just had more direct control over the steps in between. With AI in the loop, those steps are shared with something that has its own priors. The best we can do is notice the drift—and decide when we want to correct for it and when we're happy to land at Z.